Wednesday, November 23, 2016

It’s the holiday season, so here’s a suggestion for
your shopping list: Give a newspaper subscription. Better, give two – one local
and one national.

To me, getting the newspapers – yes, two -- off the
sidewalk in the morning and sitting with them and a cup of coffee is one of the
joys of life. People who read newspapers prefer to read them in print, studies
show, but fewer people are experiencing that joy.

It’s an irony of our time that newspaper circulation
continues to decline when we need to know more than ever what our elected
officials are doing. Our democracy needs voters who can distinguish between
truth and lies.

We need real news, reliable information from sources
we can trust. Real news is the antidote to toxic fake news, click-bait stories
that deliberately mislead readers for fun and profit.

Average weekday newspaper circulation fell 7 percent
last year, the most since 2010. Sunday paper circulation also declined. Both
were because of fewer print sales. Digital circulation rose 2 percent, according
to the Pew State of the News Media report in June.

For newspapers to survive and do their watchdog work,
they need advertising revenue, which also is in decline.

I recommend giving the print product because we all
spend too many hours in front of screens. If your friends and family prefer
getting their news digitally, by all means give them a digital subscription. Three-fourths
of newspapers now require a subscription to read online.

Bashing the news media is always in fashion for
politicians. President-elect Donald Trump has said about the news media: “They
are so dishonest…70 to 75 percent are totally dishonest. Absolute scum.
Remember that. Scum. Scum. Totally dishonest people.”

He has said he wants to
open up the libel laws so he can sue newspapers, although he had second
thoughts when someone told him he might get sued more as a result.

Trump, who rarely mentions The New York Times without
the word “failing,” is thin-skinned. He doesn’t like news stories that are critical
of him and his policies.

With 13 million followers on Twitter and 12 million on
Facebook, he prefers to bypass the media. On Monday, he put out his plans for
his first 100 days as president in a YouTube video.

But who broke the story of Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email server? The Times in March 2015 ran a page one story that led to
the FBI investigation.

And it’s not just the big, national newspapers that do
excellent work. Reporters for the Tampa Bay Times and Sarasota Herald-Tribune devoted
18 months to a project that uncovered a pattern of violence, neglect and 15
deaths in state mental hospitals in Florida.

The Portland Press Herald in Maine ran a six-part
series documenting severe ecological changes in the warming ocean from Nova
Scotia to Cape Cod.

Newspapers and the news media are not perfect, of
course. The botched prognostications of the presidential election results hurt credibility.
Reduced budgets have led to staff cuts and curtailed coverage.

Trump is the latest in a line of presidents and
presidential contenders who have used the news media for target practice. Lyndon
Johnson scolded the media that criticized his Vietnam policy. Richard Nixon had
journalists on his enemies list.

During the 1992 campaign, President George H.W. Bush
loved the bumper strip that read: “Annoy the media. Re-elect Bush.”

Bush, though, distinguished between the reporters
covering him and the talking heads he thought unfair. Trump has shown universal
disdain, although he cares deeply what’s said about him.

Trump reportedly rises at 5 a.m., reads several
newspapers, including The New York Times, and watches the morning TV shows –
and then he tweets.

For all his bluster, even Trump recognizes the value
of newspapers.

At his meeting with the Times’s reporters and editors Tuesday,
he called it “a great, great American jewel, a world jewel.” And he said. “I hope
we can get along.”

Right. We’ll see how that works out.

But reading a daily newspaper -- or two -- will give
you the best chance of knowing what really happens around the corner and in the
nation’s capital.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

A friend tells me she’s still very sad. The election was a “slap
in the face of decency,” and she can’t forgive her sisters and their husbands for
voting for Donald Trump.

Another friend has trouble sleeping. A third said she’s
stuck in election denial.

“It cannot be as bad as we can imagine,” she wrote in an
email, adding, “Yes it is.”

Nearly 62 million Hillary Clinton voters are as gloomy as
the nearly 61 million Trump voters are jubilant.

Into this maelstrom of emotions comes the holiday devoted to
carbs, calories – and gratitude. What -- now?

Yes, bring on Thanksgiving. We have rarely needed it more.

We can’t always agree about politics, and shouldn’t. But we
can use the pause in our daily routines to gather together, give thanks for
what we have and share love with family and friends.

We’ve been giving thanks since before we had a president or
a country. Massachusetts and Virginia still squabble over where the first
Thanksgiving occurred. The Pilgrims’ celebration of the harvest and survival
with about 90 Wampanoag Indians was in 1621, two years after Virginia colonists
marked their safe arrival with a day of prayerful thanksgiving.

In 1789, George Washington signed a proclamation declaring a
day of “public thanksgiving and prayer” for the new government. Other
presidents followed, with a few interruptions. Thomas Jefferson refused to
issue a Thanksgiving proclamation because he saw it as a conflict of church and
state.

It took a decades-long crusade by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor
of Godey’s Lady’s Book, to bring the national holiday into being. She wrote her
first editorial on the subject in 1837.

Thanksgiving “might, without inconvenience, be observed on
the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all
New England; and also in our sister states, who have grafted it upon their
social system. It would then have a national character, which would,
eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of `Ingathering,’”
she wrote.

With foresight, she added: “It is a festival which will
never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart – the
social and domestic ties.”

After many more editorials and through Hale’s persistent appeals,
more than 30 states and territories had Thanksgiving on their calendars by the
1850s.

Because Hale never gave up, our national Thanksgiving
holiday was created at a time even more divisive than ours. She finally
persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation in October 1863, as
the Civil War raged.

Lincoln put out a call to “fellow-citizens in every part of
the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning
in foreign lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as
a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the
Heavens.”

Secretary of State William H. Seward,
not Lincoln, actually wrote the proclamation, although Lincoln signed it.
Seward’s original manuscript was sold a year later to raise money for Union
troops, according to Abraham Lincoln Online.

The holiday was celebrated on the last Thursday of November
by tradition – until President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought he’d boost retail
sales by moving Thanksgiving up a week in 1939, from Nov. 30 to Nov. 23. An
uproar ensued, and some states celebrated two Thanksgivings. Two years later
Congress set Thanksgiving in law as the fourth Thursday.

Today we know that practicing gratitude – and not just on
Thanksgiving -- is good for us. Hundreds of academic studies have found physical,
psychological and social benefits in gratitude – from lower blood pressure to
less loneliness to more optimism.

Gratitude is “an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that
there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received,” Robert
A. Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, wrote
in an essay for Greater Good, a University of California, Berkeley, website.

Emmons, a leading authority in the study of gratitude, said by
practicing gratitude, “we recognize that the sources of this goodness are
outside of ourselves.”

And yet, one of the many ironies of the 2016 election is
that Clinton’s marital status and gender may define her place in history – as
former first lady and first woman presidential nominee of a major political
party.

She won the popular vote, but because she did not win
the White House, she will always be seen as the wife of a president. Because of
the Electoral College, she will never have the chance to prove herself as
president.

For all her subsequent accomplishments, marrying Bill
Clinton was Hillary’s best career move, her ticket to the national stage.

As his wife, she became first lady of Arkansas and the
first lady of the United States.

She, an ambitious Yale law graduate surely would have succeeded
in life on her own, but we’ll never know if she would have become a U.S.
senator, secretary of state and a presidential contender – twice – had she not first
risen to prominence in the role of Mrs. In this way, the Hillary Clinton story
is more 20th century than 21st.

The Clintons’ marriage,
like most relationships, is unfathomable to those on the outside. When her husband was accused of womanizing during his bid for
the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton proved her loyalty
by dutifully standing by her man -- even as she denied she was doing so.

She later showed her strength by enduring the public humiliation
of his philandering in the White House.

So it seems a particularly cruel twist of fate that,
after she built her own president-ready resume with Senate and State Department
posts, her husband may be to blame for Donald Trump’s decision to enter the 2016
presidential race.

Strange as it now seems, both Clintons formerly were friends
with Trump, who donated to the Clinton Foundation and played golf with Bill.

Bill Clinton called his pal Trump in May 2015 and
encouraged him to play a larger role in Republican politics, The Washington
Post reported.

What exactly was said in the private phone
conversation isn’t known. A few weeks later, Trump glided down the escalator at
Trump Tower and began knocking off GOP presidential contenders, one by one.

And so, Hillary Clinton who in 2008 lost to a Democratic
outsider promising change, lost Tuesday to a Republican outsider promising
change.

As the 2016 campaign tightened at the end, Clinton relied
more and more on President Obama and his popular wife, Michelle, to make the
case for her. Days before the election, the president conversationally asked
men about their resistance to a woman president.

“I just want to say to the guys out there . . . there’s
a reason why we haven’t had a woman president before . . . I want every man out
there who’s voting to kind of look inside yourself and ask yourself, if you’re
having problems with this stuff, how much of it is that we’re just not used to
it?” Obama said at a Clinton rally in Columbus, Ohio.

“So that, like, when a
guy is ambitious and out in the public arena and working hard, well, that’s OK.
But when a woman suddenly does it, suddenly you’re all like, well, why is she
doing that?” he said.

But Trump also won the votes of white women 53 percent
to Clinton’s 43 percent.

When Tim Kaine, Clinton’s running mate, introduced her
at her concession speech Wednesday, he said: “She has made history. In a nation
that is good at so many things, but that has made it uniquely difficult for
women to be elected to federal office, she became the first major party nominee
as a woman to be president and last night won the popular vote of Americans for
the president.”

Minutes later, Clinton, with her husband standing
behind her, said:

“I know we have still not shattered that highest and
hardest glass ceiling, but some day someone will, and hopefully sooner than we
might think right now.”

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will hold
victory parties but, before the night is over, one will concede defeat. If
we’re lucky.

We can take nothing for granted. To the end, Trump
remains a question mark. In his last debate with Clinton, he refused to say
whether he would accept the results of the election.

“I will keep you in suspense,” he said. It was outrageous,
provocative and pure Trump. He still appears likely to come up short in the
Electoral College, although polls have tightened in the last week.

One thing is certain, though. The American people have
suffered enough disappointment during this dispiriting campaign. Barring an
election disaster, the loser needs to accept the will of the voters with grace
and urge his or her followers to do the same.

The winner also must move immediately to begin
repairing the breach that has riven the country.

This presidential contest has always been more about
the candidates’ deficiencies than their policies. When the votes are finally counted,
it’s time for all of us to put the country first.

Our admirable American tradition holds that defeated
presidential candidates rise to the occasion for the sake of the greater good.
It’s reassuring to see failed candidates muster grace – and even humor -- at a
time of personal misery.

In 1908, after his third failed campaign for the White
House, Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan said: “I am reminded of the
drunk who, when he had been thrown down the stairs of the club for the third
time, gathered himself up, and said, `I am on to those people. They don’t want
me in there,’” William Safire wrote in “Safire’s New Political Dictionary.”

Going into the 1948 election, Thomas Dewey was
confident he’d beat Harry Truman – as were some newspaper editors. We’ve all seen
the screaming banner headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune, “DEWEY DEFEATS
TRUMAN.”

All night the votes came in. When Dewey awoke the next
morning to learn he’d lost, he sent a gracious telegram to Truman.

“My heartiest
congratulations to you on your election and every good wish for a successful
administration. I urge all Americans to unite behind you in support of every
effort to keep our nation strong and free and establish peace in the world,” he
wrote.

Asked by reporters what had happened, Dewey replied, “I
was just as surprised as you are . . . It has been grand fun, boys and girls. I
enjoyed it immensely.”

Four years later, when he lost to Dwight Eisenhower, Democrat
Adlai Stevenson said he was reminded of the story about Abraham Lincoln after
an election defeat. Lincoln said he felt like the boy who stubbed his foot in
the dark -- “too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

After the bitter 1960 presidential campaign, Richard
Nixon offered a quasi-concession statement to John F. Kennedy.

“If the present trend continues, Mister Kennedy, Senator
Kennedy, will be the next president of the United States,” Nixon told his
supporters in California about midnight Pacific time.

“I want Senator Kennedy
to know . . . that certainly if this trend does continue, and he does become
our next president, that he will have my wholehearted support and yours too,”
Nixon said.

Nixon was convinced voter fraud cost him the election
but he did not demand a recount despite JFK’s razor-thin margin of victory --
just over 100,000 votes out of 68 million votes cast.